Some things make a post

[kaberett]

1. On Sunday, A & I went to The Postal Museum, including a ride on the Mail Rail. It was great. It was a SMALL TRAIN that went through POST TUNNELS and I was very excited and flappy. Be warned that it's quite cramped; I sat and watched one of the videos and it included a lot of elderly engineers ergo there followed a nontrivial quantity of inexplicable-to-onlookers weeping; I learned things about how the Royal Mail started out (genuinely just for royalty), the origins of the post horn (I knew perfectly well what it was for on Alpine post buses but hadn't put together how it started), the existence of both air mail pillar boxes and pillar boxes with integrated stamp dispensers (which were really very short lived because they fundamentally didn't work very well), and about Travelling Post Offices a preserved iteration of which we're now planning to make a visit to. I also fell down the rabbit-hole of trying to look up procedural differences in how first- and second-class post are handled; A found me a not-as-informative-as-I'd-hoped Freedom of Information request, and I found a video with obnoxious ableism/ageism and backing music but some interesting if irrelevant stuff (phosphorus detectors!). A+ nerding all round, would visit again.

2. A & I have got started on Leverage courtesy of a loan of the box sets from sebastienne and shortcipher.

3. Early this evening I submitted my first first-author paper. It took me four hours to get from "okay, I'm ready to submit" to actually hitting the submit button on the website. Good grief but the interface is terrible. I am feeling pretty good about this, and especially good that the latest night I've had working on it was Monday, when I was poking at it til shortly before midnight and then went to bed and... my supervisor made functionally 0 corrections to the bit I put together (from scratch) in that session.

4. New horn case is excellent, is indeed encouraging me to practice more, and I am very rapidly observing the benefits... just in time for Saturday's concert, or not, as the case may be. But: hopefully will manage to keep up the momentum.

5. I don't think I mentioned here that I finished the Duolingo Turkish tree last week, but I did and for all there are huge chunks that I am Really Not Very Good At Yet I am fundamentally pretty proud of myself for that one, too.

6. I have been spending more social time with people over the last few weeks than I had prior to that and it's been really good. Thank you, all. <3

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

Oh my I very want to go to the Postal Museum now!

[child_of_the_air]

That museum sounds really really cool! Flaps in sympathy! It certainly sounds more interesting than the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, though I admit I haven't been to that in a number of years.

I had no idea that Royal Mail was originally just for royalty: I'd assumed it was called "royal" to indicate it was under royal protection or some such. I'd also never heard of a post horn before, so I certainly know nothing about how it started.

I'm a little surprised that air mail pillar boxes were a surprise to you, and that they're not common in the UK. In the US, they're definitely a thing that exists, though less common than regular pillar boxes. (By air mail, I mean what the US calls "Priority Mail", which I assume is the same thing. Domestic US mail sometimes travels by air without being Priority, due to the country being so big. But Priority is faster and more expensive. And slower and cheaper than Express.)

Pillar boxes with integrated stamp dispensers do sound like they'd work poorly, but now I'm curious about the details?

So the UK had Railway Post Offices, too? I've seen a number of them in railway museums here: they were apparently common enough and retired recently enough that a lot of American railway museums ended up with one.

What is Second Class Post in the UK? In the US, it refers specifically to bulk mail; is it similar there?



And congrats on the first-author paper submission! And yay, more social time! I wish you weren't so far away so I could visit you occasionally....

[sebenikela]

re #3 I DO NOT UNDERSTAND why places like Elsevier can't make a submission system that isn't terrible. It's so frustrating. And their review system is also horrible, I uploaded a word doc with comments once and the system just ate it or something so the authors got a blank file (or nothing, i don't remember, but definitely not what i uploaded). How is this so hard you are a giant publishing company people pay you absurd amounts of money to access your journals please for the love of all that's holy make a system that works. (and every system i've used is terrible, granted that's like 3 but STILL)

With Leverage, the warning I usually give people is that if you're tired of Nate being terrible in season one, it does get better in season 2 and continuing. He's still not a nice person! But he gets less obnoxious about it.

And holy shit MAIL RAIL that sounds amazing. And really smart! the mail would never get stuck in traffic!

[child_of_the_air]

I think the correct question is, since when has Elsevier ever cared about anything other than increasing stockholder value?

[sebenikela]

This is true. They're so evil and so hard to avoid.

[child_of_the_air]

Yeah. One of the few upsides of failing out of grad school with no publications is not having had to publish anything with them.

[vass]

CONGRATULATIONS on submitting your first first-author paper!

And I'm really impressed about the Duolingo thing. That's great.

<3 <3 <3

[kaberett]

Complete trees are now German and Turkish. Going to finish French up too then get properly stuck into Gaelic, is the plan. <3

[chiasmata]

Ha! The day we submitted my last paper was spent almost entirely in my boss's office, chain-drinking tea and cursing the website. It's like a rite of passage, or something. Congrats on submission!

[killing_rose]

Were you in the US, I would just hand you my Netflix and hulu accounts, as I believe Leverage is on both, and because I love and adore them so much and want everyone to see the awesome.

[ex_we935]

Congratulations on your paper and on completing the Turkish tree! :3 Also, the Postal Museum sounds fascinating. :)

~K.

[antiqueight]

How are you enjoying Leverage? I just finished a rewatch. I really like that show - even if I do watch some of it on fast forward.